Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
OCTOBER
9ra,
1916
tide of common thought Which bathed our life retired Slow, slow the old world wore to naught, And pulse by pulse expired. Matthew Arnold, Obermann Once More.
WESTFALL THOMPSON
TO W. H.
P.
860775
when
thought
and
have
formed
some
sort of
philosophy of
Such men have yet sufficient unto himself. lived in every age, and will continue to be
is to perish of moral inanition. history of one such clear and brave thinker of the Middle Ages, hitherto not mere
The
unknown,
little
is
embraced
It is
book.
student, nurtured in the academic skepticism prevailing at the Uni versity of Paris in the thirteenth century, who
young mediaeval
philosophy,
knowledge of which the Middle Ages acquired through the medium of Arabic and Jewish thought. Finally, capti vated by the glamour of the religion of Julian and the dead gods, he secretly became a pagan in thought and feeling.
Aristotelianism,
;
;"The
Old memories,
tc
him became
things."
the heritage
of splendid,
moving
How came
pagan
ism to be discovered? From my boyhood the imagery and vision of the famous hymn "Jeru salem the Golden * has had a charm for me,
"
I am far from accepting its theology. The authorship of this mediaeval Latin poem,
though
in the original entitled De contemptu mundi, is ascribed to one Bernard of Cluny, of the
twelfth century.
Tradition says that he was a Breton. In the summer of 1906 I attacked the problem
Cluny?
of the authorship of this poem, and, as the which need not be entered
came
instead of having been a Breton, was a Provengal, a son of William V., seigneur of MontFor every thing pertaining to the authorship and famous hymn of the church see the late Samuel Macauley Jackson s The source of "Jeru salem the Golden," together with a prose translation by Mr. Henry Preble, published by the University of Chicago Press, 1910.
history of this
1
This
in
"footnote
to
saw the
light
the
Cambridge
Journal of Theological Studies in April, 1907. I never thought of reverting to the subject
again. In the spring of that same year I went to France for study, and there was forwarded to
me
more a
letter
which was to prove to be the open door to one of the most interesting experiences which has It was a letter from His ever befallen me. Grace, Francois M. A. de Cabrieres, the bishop
of Montpellier, written in ecclesiastical Latin, of which this is the translation
:
BISHOPRIC OF MONTPELLIER
MONTPELLIER, HERAULT, 1907, 20 mai.
Optime Domine: It was with great astonishment and pleasure that I saw your article recently published in the last num
ber of the Journal of Theological Studies. The town, popularly called Murles, is situated in my diocese; but I had never heard that the pious author of the poem concerning celestial glory was born in it, and Neale himself locates the natal place of our said monk in the town of Morlaix in Brittany, and asserts that he was born of an English family. But your opinion is very pleasing to me, and I would like to know what has been published about the life, the writings and the poem itself of Bernard, whether in England, or in Germany, or among us. I presume this much upon your kindness, and ask that you will do me the favor to write a brief sum mary, in which I may learn to what sources I should go, what books also to read, in order that I may ac quire knowledge readily in regard to this matter per-
taining to
my
and
virtues.
on any day, in travelling through France, to visit Montpellier, and God be willing to lengthen my days till that time, it will be an honor and a pleasure to me to be your guide to the ancient town of Murles, and we will say our prayers together not far from the ruins of that old castle where, per
If ever,
you wish
haps, Bernard was born. Believe me, Domine Optime, your humble and de voted servant in Christ, FR. M. A. DE CABRIERES,
Bishop of Montpellier.
1
Optime domine
et satisfactione mihi fuit quod, in ultimo fascicule Diarii de Theologicis Studiis, nuperrime edito, tuam viderim notam super identitate Bernardi Cluniacensis. Oppidum, vulgo Murles appellatur, in mea diocesi situm est; sed numquam audieram in eo natum fuisse pium auctorem Rhymthi de gloria celesti: et ipse Neale natalem locum dicti monachi nostri in urbe Britanniae minoris Morlaix
Maxima admiratione
reponit, eumque e familia anglica ortum affirmat. Tua vero sententia maxima mihi arridet, vellemque cognoscere quidquid de vita, scriptis et ipso rhymtho Bernardi publicatum fuit sic, sive in Anglia, sive in Germania, et etiam apud nos. Illud de benevolentia prasumo quod mihi digneris scribere summam brevem, in qua possim videre quasnam debeam fontes adire, quos etiam libros percurrere ut convenienter de tali diocesano meo, et natalibus et virtutibus praeclaro notitiam acquirere possim. Si quadam die, Galliam percurrendo, Montempes-
sulanum visitare desideras, et Deus dies meos ad hoc usque tempus servare voluerit, ad antiquum pagum Murles te ducere mihi honor erit et gaudium, amboque presec nostras effundemus non longe a ruderibus veteris castelli ubi forsan Bernardus natus est. Me, Domine Optime, tuus obsequiosus et devotus
servus in Christo, crede, FR. M. A. DE CABRIERES, episcopus Montempessulanensis.
lost
no time in accepting
this interesting
invitation.
perfect type of
that
charming kind of ecclesiastic of which the French clergy, in particular, are examples. He was tall and spare of figure, with an ascetic beauty of countenance which made his face a benediction; his manners were those of the gentlest and most refined of grand seigneurs of the ancien regime. I was glad when Pius X. elevated him to the cardinalate, in which ex alted office, alas, he lived too short a time.
The good bishop read English better than he spoke it, and my French was no better, I fear. But we managed to get along well. His
library
lighted
atmosphere of a monastic scriptorium hover ing over it. The visible books were few, save for those upon his table. There were no book cases. The books were all kept in presses after the manner of the Middle Ages, as they still are in the Vatican Library. But we did not see Bernard s birthplace to
gether. The bishop s library had more attrac tions for me than the obscure hamlet in the
country near by. Some of his books I already knew, more of them I had read of but not read. But books, except incunabula and those rarissimmi libri which collectors prize, exist in numbers great or less; examples even of the rarest books may be found in the British
Museum
or
Harvard
University
Library.
Manuscripts, however, are birds of another feather. There may be, of course, several 1 copies of a manuscript. But many are unique. In the small collection of manuscripts which
the bishop possessed
fixed
my
attention.
Every one knows the story of Browning s Yellow Book," that crumpled mass of parchment in which he discovered the plot of The Ring and the Book, a manuscript now
"Old
among
brary.
was then mine. With pride, yet with a certain measure of hesitation, the bishop laid before
a few leaves of parchment for the posses sion of which he whimsically apologized. It was a medieval Latin poem composed of two
me
hundred and forty hexameter lines, covering eight pages. The parchment leaves measured six and three-quarters inches in length by
Some ancient authors have descended to modern times in one MS. only, or in a few MSS. derived im mediately or with little interval from one. Such are Lucretius, Catullus, Valerius Flaccus, and Statius in his "Silvse." Others there are whose text, though in the main reposing on a single copy, can be corrected here and there from others, inferior indeed, but still independent and indispensable. Such are Juvenal,
Ovid in his "Heroides," Seneca in his "Tragedies," and Statius in his "Thebais" and "Achilleis." There is a third class whose text comes down from a remote original through separate channels, and is preserved by MSS. of unlike character but like fidelity, each
serving in its turn to correct the faults of others. A. E. Housman, Manilius, Astronomicon, bk. introd. xxx-xxxi.
I,
1
The
text itself
meas
ured five and three-quarters inches in length by two and three-quarters inches in width. There were thirty lines to a page. As a rule the letters of the manuscript were excellently formed, but small. The first letters of each
line
The manu like a column of figures. was probably of the late thirteenth Whether it was the original or a century.
appear
script
am
unable to say.
It
certainly the only known example in exist ence, and I am inclined to believe that it was
the original handwriting of the author. ing my intense interest in the poem, the
See
good
bishop permitted
of
it,
me
to
make
a transcript
and
days in so doing. That is why I never got At the end of to Murles with the bishop. this term I had already imposed too much
upon
Dear old saintly man, I cher memory of him! The poem is the most startlingly pagan ut terance which I know of in the whole field of mediaeval literature. It was without formal
his time.
ish the
title,
the capital letters D. V. R. at the head of the first page. For a time they had for me the
cabalistic
DXV
of
in Purgatorio, canto xxxiii. After some of the manuscript I came to the conclu study sion that the mysterious letters stood for De
Dante
by from a treatise of St. Augustine with the same title, and was delib erately so chosen. For the whole purpose of Augustine s tract is to prove that there was no religion worthy of the name in the ancient pagan cults; while the whole tenor of this poem is to show that "forgotten things," as Sir Gilbert Murray has reminded us, if there
the
vera religione -"Concerning true religion." This title, I believe, was directly borrowed
unknown
writer
"
be real
them, will sometimes return out of the dust, vivid to help still in the forward
x
life in
groping of
humanity."
In the history of thought there are cycles, each characterized by a dominant form of
thinking and a peculiar quality of the imag ination. The lines of partition are not always
distinct between these periods, of course, and the edge of one epoch blurs into that of the next. But nevertheless the differentiation is
manifest.
into the
Reformation, though the exact point of trans formation is undiscernible. The dividing line
is really not a point or a mark, but a penumbra. But great thoughts, and especially great
systems
of
die.
thought
or
philosophy,
rarely
classics
wholly
still
live,
yet
has
Every philosophic system may be con from the point of view of its own from the latter because time all of and time
able.
sidered both
solution to the problems it presents some which the universe raises that an intelligent
have
^s
"The
Sir Leslie Stephen quite just when he writes: briefest possible glance at the old systems of
philosophy shows us ... nothing but imperishable imperishable aesthetically, but logically mere crumbling fragments. We can still read Plato with delight; but the delight is due to the beauty of style and exposition, not certainly to the conviction im posed by his reasoning. Aristotle s philosophy is a marvel for his time; but his theory of the universe is The no more tenable than his natural science. vast development of scholastic philosophy in the Middle Ages showed only how far unlimited ingenuity and subtlety may lead in the wrong direction, if it It ended by upset starts with mistaken principles. ting the doctrines which it attempted to prove, and had finally to commit suicide or fall before the in
ruins
. .
against
surrection of living thought. The great who revolted its tyranny in its later stages constructed new
which
systems which, to them, seemed demonstrable, but We cannot to us are already untenable. accept Descartes or Spinoza or Leibnitz or Bacon or Hobbes or Locke as giving satisfactory or even coherent systems. Philosophies of every differ ent variety have been not merely accepted by those who first devised them, but have been taken up in
. .
.
good faith by whole schools of disciples; they have been tested, on a large scale, by systematic applica tion to all relevant questions, and one after another has become bankrupt, has lost its hold on the world, and confessed that it leaves the riddle as dark as it
was
before."
osophizing,"
Leslie Stephen, "The vanity of phil in Social Rights and Duties, vol. 2, pp.
187-89.
been souls out of tune with the prevailing note of their time, whose spiritual affiliation is with
a remoter, earlier epoch. The older the race grows, and the greater the variety and accre
tion of
its history, the more numerous do these phenomena surviving from a former period become in our modern life. Whistler was a
Newman
of the
say, that
"misunderstood,"
he
is
"ununder-
It is
of the nature of
votaries
man
to look
askance
at
the
of
unconventional
osophy or
of
its
religion.
Convention owes
much
force to mass weight, tradition, the in ertia of conservatism. It is, therefore, in that degree, a denial in terms of imagination in
life.
When
convention
is
backed by the au
thority of state or church to enforce conform ity in the form of sumptuary laws governing
attire, or in the form of dogmas shall be believed and pro what prescribing hibiting what shall not be believed, then it be comes a tyranny, and the man who manifests unconventional ideas which are not according
clothes
and
to the standards
imposed
is
regarded as a
rebel or a heretic.
that the
For many years it was the prevailing belief Middle Ages were characterized by an absolute ignorance of and hostility to anti quity until the Italian Renaissance; that me10
diaeval literature and mediaeval art were spon taneously developed, in full originality, with out the aid of ancient thought and ancient art. Only of late has this erroneous idea been overthrown, or at least radically modified.
Modern research into the history of mediaeval culture has conclusively shown that mediaeval literature and the fine arts owed much both of
their inspiration
and
their
form
to the persist
1 ence of antiquity. of The charm antiquity exerted its spell over mediaeval minds more than we think, in and spite of the antagonism between mediaeval The opposition between the ancient ideals.
be apparent in the third its genius century. After Antonines. of the in time the expiring
to
Mittelalter, 2 vols.,
Anton Springer, Das Nachleben der Antike im Bonn, 1886, and a review of this work by Eugene Muntz in Journal des Savants, 1887. Rahn, Das Erbe der Antike, Basel, 1872.
Bartoli, / Precursori del Rinascimento, 1876; Comparetti, Virgilio net media evo. Graf, Roma nella memoria e nelle immagiozioni
del
media evo. Gaston Paris, La legende de Trajan. Gidel, La legende d Aristote. Sathas, Roman d Achille. Paul Meyer, La legende d Alexandre. Dunger, Die Sage vom trojanischen Kriege in den Bearbeitungen des Mittelalters und ihre antiken
Quellen, Leipzig, 1839. Boutaric, La connaissance Vincent de Beauvais.
Julien, "Alexandre pendant Annales archeologiques, 1847.
de
le
antiquite
chez
in
Moyen-Age,"
11
them the
banal;
originality of the
mind of
the ancient
taste
became
Christianity, al from the universal in part suffering though decadence, showed a greater intellectual and
moral force than the secular world, and began to form its own canons of literature and art. Yet for a long time Christianity was content to borrow from paganism the established for
mulae, giving them, however, a new applica But little by tion and a new interpretation.
truly Christian themes developed. Begun during the period of the persecutions, the transformation was completed by the early fifth century. By that time Christian thought and Christian art, even though retaining a
little
number and variety of motifs which were of pagan origin, nevertheless not only had developed its own types, but had crystal A new world of art and of the lized them. spirit had come into being.
great
During the first period belief in the superi ority of Graeco-Roman literature and art, at least from the point of view of form, was un
challenged, except among the zealots of the faith. What was denied and opposed was the
trayal.
immorality of the ideas, the license of the por But the victory of the church in the
fourth century altered the relation of things.
The persecuted church became the triumphant church. It was for its former adversaries
henceforward to plead for clemency.
12
What
the literature, the art, the philosophy of anti It was one chiefly of hostility and quity?
icorioclasm. "Let us shun the lying fables of the poets and forego the wisdom of the sages of antiquity," exclaims Gregory of Tours in
600 A.D. Yet centuries of spoliation and neglect were required to waste the inestimable heritage derived from the past. Perhaps we
may
when
regard the eleventh century as the epoch the reminiscence of antiquity ceased to
be a living force and passed into the domain of history and erudition. By that time only
a few strong spirits still cherished in their secret hearts ideals out of a glorious past, and
strove to breast the current of prejudice indifference.
and
The
partly a matter of principle, partly instinctive. The church and the secular powers were
banded together
ligion, the authority of the church, and the polity of a feudal Europe against innovation and change. The memory of ancient Roman
all in
Rome.
In 998 Nicho
son of a tribune of Rome, the papal domination to overthrow attempted an by impassioned appeal to the glories of pagan and republican Rome. Out of fraglas Crescentius, the
13
ments of ancient ruins he built that pictur esque little house which still stands facing the Ponto Rotto. In the twelfth century Arnold of
Brescia proclaimed the necessity of destroying the temporal power of the popes and the re building of the Capitol. The same enthusiasm
for antiquity fired Cola di Rienzi. Yet even in the Kulturdammerung of the eleventh cen
tury there are gleams of the old light. Andre of Fleury [died circa 1056], describing the architectural changes which his superior, the
the
abbot Gosselin, made in that monastery, uses famous phrase attributed to Augustus: urbem laterciam repperi, relinquam mar-
moream.
In the twelfth century a new spirit, or rather the old spirit become new, began to blow across Europe, which drew its inspiration from the pagan world. Ancient culture began
slowly to come into its own once more. Arch bishop Heraclius of Lyons [died 1163] wrote
a treatise entitled:
De
coloribus et artibus
Pil
Romanorum,
grimages remote past.
to
in
struction of the
monuments of
antiquity.
Rome
Hildesheim early became the seat of a fascin Bishop Bernward ating artistic renaissance.
14
[993-1022], inspired by a visit to Italy, the country most redolent of antiquity and pagan tradition, with the aid of imported Italian craftsmen, created those exquisite bronze
doors which separate the west vestibule from the nave in Hildesheim cathedral. Italy itself
had nothing approaching them until Ghiberti created those world famous bronze doors of
the Battistero in Florence.
In twelfth cen
Le Mans was a classical scholar, and in his time unmatched as a writer of Latin prose and verse. Many of his elegiac poems survive, some of them," says antique in sentiment and so cor Taylor,
tury France
"Hildebert
of
"so
rect in
One
*
of the best
is
an elegy on
Rome
of
This reviving interest in antiquity did not pass unchallenged. The church was not un willing to have scholars like John of Salisbury toy with classical literature as an intellectual diversion. But it was quite another thing in
the church
inspiration
"pious"
eye to have men derive a spiritual from the founts of paganism. The and the self-righteous bitterly in
s
so
that are
pagan?"
Bernard of
"On Hildebert of Le Mans see Taylor, The Me diaeval Mind, vol. II, pp. 137-47. His elegy on the ruins of Rome is given in vol. II, pp. 191-92.
15
Cluny scornfully exclaims. "He that babbles Socrates and has the sinuous utterances of the
sophists at his fingers abbot. ... great
ends
man
is
Agenor and Melibceus and Sapphic verse. The letters of old, the muse of old, are now highly prized and thought the cream of
wisdom."
The leaven of
intellectual
eleventh
antiquity worked a spirit of revolt in Italy as early as the century. Vilgard, master of the
school at Ravenna, declared that what the ancient poets had said was true, and that they
body of Christian
The first conspicuous victim of the church who was condemned because he followed the lure of ancient thought too far was Amaury of Chartres, who was professor of logic and exe
gesis in the University of Paris, and who fell under the spell of Plotinus and became a Neo1
Rodolf Glaber, Historiarum, Bk. II, ch. 12. Rodolf Glaber, Bk. Ill, ch. 8; Renan, Aver roes
16
et
averroisme, p. 282.
though he borrowed much also and Aristotle. Condemned as a pantheist he was burned with ten of his fol lowers in the first decade of the thirteenth 1 century. Roger Bacon was profoundly im bued with paganism, declaring that "we should seek in the books of the ancient philosophers the soul of truth which revelation placed there; that we should follow up the traces of Christian dogma in paganism [a most pene trating utterance] and thus add all we can to our inherited treasure usque ad finem mundi, quia nihil perfectum in humanis adinventionibus." He had the courage to say that "con temporary Christians were inferior morally to the pagan philosophers, from whose books
Platonist,
from the
Stoics
3
leaf."
While
that
"the
it
is
true, as
more
abstract
dogmas
inherited
from
the Greek
seem
very
never ages, tinged with Greek philosophy to have influenced the popular mind
4
nevertheless, especially in the thirteenth century, there were many classes of society deeply penetrated by the pagan
much,"
in
American Histor
Coulton,
Ages."
"The
Plain
Man
17
philosophic thought of antiquity. Plato, Aris totle, and Lucretius were the greatest of these That of the first tended towards influences. and was far less destructive of pantheism
established
authority
than
the
two
others.
Enormous and revolutionary as the influence of Aristotle was upon mediaeval thought, its effect was wholly among the highest intel
lectual
circles,
university
skepticism.
The philosophy of Lucretius, on the other hand, pervaded various strata of middle class
and was disquieting and destructive of prevailing authority in both church and state,
society
in especial in the case of the former.
aeval
etics,
Medi
of rationalists, of the Ghibelline parti sans of the independence of the state from church control in Germany and Italy; in France it backed the arm of Philip IV. in his
It is great conflict with pope Boniface VIII. of of Jandun in the John teachings implicit
and Marsiglio of Padua. The Florentine histo 1 rian Villani records how Florence was twice devastated by fire, once in 1115 and again in 1117, and attributes the double calamity to a judgment of God, "forasmuch as the city was
evilly corrupted by heresy, the sect of the Epicureans
among
and
others
by
this
sec. 30.
18
St.
Francis and of
The most positive influence, though, of Lu cretius is perceived in the beliefs and prac tices of the sect of the Cathari, the greatest
heretical sect of the thirteenth century.
all
It
over southern France, and was spread from the industrial classes recruited largely of the thriving manufacturing towns of Lan2
guedoc.
"The
youthful
"were
perfects
of the
sect,"
says
De Wulf,
wont
of the Albigensian period [and] to attack the The savants of the Dominican Order
. .
.
Cathari taught in their psychology that the human spiritus perishes with the body.
.
.
were Epicurus and Lucretius, whose materialistic atomism they And having disposed to their reproduced.
Their
favorite
sources
satisfaction of the immortality of the soul, they boldly denied the doctrine of reward and
3
evil."
It
is
canto 10, although the commentators usually take it to be an allusion to Frederick II. and his votaries. So Plumtre and Norton, and Kington-Oliphant, The emperor Frederick II., I, 371. Ozanam, Dante, 6th ed., 1872, p. 48, and Renan, Averroes et averroisme, p. 284, rightly trace the reference to 1115. 2 See Alphandery, Les idees morales chez les heterdoxes latins au debut du XIHe siecle. 3 De Wulf, History of Philosophy, pp. 389, 219. For a comprehensive history of the preservation and influence of Lucretius in the Middle Ages see 19
The result of all this intellectual ferment was a degree of rationalism in the later Middle 1 Indeed, Ages of which but few are aware. in courage and penetration the skepticism of the thirteenth century probably exceeded what
is
current now.
sity professor
pronounce the Impossibilia of Siger of Brabant? 2 That "eternal spirit of the chainless mind" never has been utterly coerced in spite of thrones and dominions, principalities and
to
Phillips,
Lucrece dans
la theologie chretienne
du Hie
au XIHe
in
De
briefer statement is siecle, Paris, 1896. Wulf, loc. cit., pp. 59 and 126. Renan, Averroes,
contains a valuable survey of the history of the introduction of Arabic philosophy into
etc., pt. II, sec. 12,
For some striking examples see Coulton in Hibbert Journal, April, 1916, p. 598. 2 See P. Mandonnet, Siger de Brabant et I averroisme latin du XIHe siecle (1911) ; Hist. lit. de la France, XXI, pp. 121-22. In Brewer s edition of the Monumenta Franciscana (Rolls Series), vol. I, p. 634, is report of a discussion by some mediaeval students of the question: "Utrum sit Deus?" Cf. Church s translation of Dante, Hell, canto X, p. 79, note 119. The chief Averroistic centres were the University of Paris and the court of Fred The Paris erick II. of Hohenstaufen at Salerno. leaders were Siger of Brabant, Boethius the Dacian, and Bernier of Nivelles. Siger flourished 1266-77. In the latter year he was condemned by the church. Raymond Lull, in order to justify the sentence, com posed a dialogue in which the "philosophici," repre sented by Socrates as interlocutor, were badly handled by the theologians. See Hist. lit. de la France, vol. xxix, p. 333. Dante praises Siger in Paradiso, canto
X, 136.
Europe. 1
20
powers, lords spiritual and lords temporal. In every century of the mediaeval era there 1 lived souls who would not be wholly shackled.
See the article by Paul Fournier, "Un adversaire inconnu de St. Bernard et de Pierre Lombard," in Bib. de Vecole des chartes, xlvii (1886), p. 394. It is a MS. from the Grande Chartreuse in the library at Grenoble, No. 290 (see Catalogue des manuscrits, Gren. p. 215) entitled Liber de vera philosophic,. Evidently written after 1179, it shows the abiding in fluence of the sect founded by Gilbert de Porree, bishop of Poitiers. "What influence," says Fournier, "this little group had upon the development of the popular heresies which so spread at this time in the south of France is a question which it would be inter esting to resolve, and one which merits the attention of scholars." Bib. de Vecole des chartes, xlvii, p. 417. One of the boldest heretical writers of the time was he our poet? was Vidal de Blois, author of a satire upon scholasticism entitled, livre de Geta et de Birria, ou FAmphitryoneide," written in Latin, of course. He probably lived in the time of Louis IX. of France, but it is not certain that he was a native
"Le
The poem
is
daringly pro-pagan.
One
Nil audet magnum qui putet esse deos. This declaration so scandalized Cardinal Mai, who discovered the manuscript in the Vatican Library in 1833, that he suppressed it in his edition, without in dicating the lacuna. See his Classici Auctores, vol. V, pp. 463-78. Later editions of this satire are those of Thomas Wright, Early Mysteries, 1838, and of Miiller at Bern, 1840. For other information on Vidal of Blois see Bib. de Vecole des chartes, ser. iv, vol. 5, pp. 474-516; Hist. lit. de la France, XV, pp. 42834; XXII, pp. 39-50; Journal des Savants, 1886, pp. 421-24; Renan, Averroes, etc., p. 283. A sermon of St. Thomas Aquinas delivered July 20, 1270, and severely reflecting on the votaries of pagan philosophy and those who doubted the immortality of the soul, may have been a rejoinder to this poem of Vidal. See
Mandonnet,
21
The bravest
ingly.
Many
ence, like
Roger Bacon, outwardly orthodox, but inwardly living their own intellectual and spiritual life, telling few or none their inmost
thoughts; sometimes endeavoring to roll the
burden
off
recently discovered manuscript of Bacon. What is the function of the heretic? Let
Nietzsche answer:
"The
philosopher, as a
man
himself, and has contradiction to the day in which he lives. His enemy has always been the ideal of his day. Hitherto all those extraordinary furtherers of humanity whom one classes as philosophers . . . have found their mission in being the bad conscience of their age. . . . They have always disclosed how much hypocrisy, in
dolence, self-indulgence, and self-neglect, how much falsehood, was concealed under the most venerated types of contemporary morality; how much virtue
was
outlived."
The same thought has been expressed in other words by the late professor Josiah Royce:
thought that has never been skepti be deep. The soul that never has doubted does not know whether it believes. ... A study of history shows that if there is anything that human thought and cultivation have to be thankful for it is an occasional, but truly great and fearless 3 age of doubt."
"Philosophical
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, p. 153. Royce, The Spirit of modern philosophy, p.
22
7.
is
Ninety-nine per centum of a man s religion the result of inheritance and environment.
the one-hundredth per centum of origin 1 How the unknown author ality that counts.
It is
of this poem, cherishing the ideas which he did, and loving the vanished pagan cults so
passionately
almost
as the
might
him
It is
Even tity is not revealed in the manuscript. to-day Maeterlinck s works are on the Index of the church of Rome because, to quote from the indictment,
"he has accepted the fiat of the destructive criti cism of science. For him religion is a city laid waste, God is a myth as completely dethroned as Jupiter Olympus; Christianity is a discredited system rele gated to the regions of exploded beliefs with the crumbled theogonies of Greece and Babylon."
had
What would Rome have done with this poet it discovered him in a century when the
was at its height? The unknown author of the poem whose discovery has been related was one whose taste and quality of thought made him a
inquisition
"Strayed Reveller" out of antiquity into the scholastic period, a veritable pagan in the age
of dogmatic theology.
Who
s,
he was
mean
The thought
is
Coulton
in
Hibbert Journal,
23
When he lived I do not know. his name can only be conjectured from internal evi dence in the poem; that he was French by birth is certain, and he was surely a cleric.
Judging from a striking allusion to "the granite piles of Carnac" and a reference to 1 "Atlantic s surge" he may have been a Breton. thirteenth He must have lived in the century. His enthusiastic allusion to Aristotle s phil osophy, which was condemned by the church in 1210, makes one think that he was writing
when
ecclesiastical authority
was vainly
try
books of the great Stagirite to 2 A s inquiring mind. increasingly Europe reference to the Lateran shows that the poem must have been composed before the fall of Boniface in 1303, before the removal of the papacy to Avignon. But the most conclusive
ing to seal the
evidence as to the time when the author lived is offered by the striking allusion to the pyra mids, which could hardly have been so vividly
mentioned before
St.
Louis of France
ill-
The starred expedition to Egypt in 1248. is almost that it is so fresh reference impos
sible not to think of
it
as derived
from
first-
1 Brittany to-day is the most intensely catholic por tion of France. But this Catholicism dates from the In the Middle Ages Brittany seventeenth century. was notorious for the active influence of many ves tiges of ancient paganism. See the thesis of Camille Vallaux, La Basse-Bretagne, Paris, 1907. 2 On Aristotle in the Middle Ages see De Wulf,
24
hand observation, or at least from one who had seen the pyramids with his own eyes. There are things in the poem of which Dante, too, makes mention. Each alludes to
the legend that pope Gregory the Great de plored that so good a man as the Roman em
peror Trajan, because he was a heathen, was not saved. But such allusions are mere acci
dental identities.
Modern
the improbability of Dante ever having been in Paris or elsewhere outside of Italy. More
Dante was born in 1265 and died in His great poem was not given to the world until close to the end of his life. Our poet, I am sure, lived and died in the thir teenth century. There is one allusion, though, which teases out of thought:
over,
1321.
"Nam
Inferno?
think
the protest of outraged intelligence against popular belief in a material hell of fire and brimstone. The spirit and temper of
this
poem
it is
The
are absolutely antithetic to Dante. 2 temper is pagan Greek of the fourth cen
that of Julian and the dying gods. the author was, he read and cher-
tury,
Whoever
1
"For there are those who summon hell itself into daylight out of black night and the gulf of shadows." 2 The way in which Dante looked upon the pagan ism" of the court of Frederick II. is evidence of this. See Hell, canto X.
"
25
De rerum
ished in his secret soul Lucretius noble poem, natura, the Meditations of Marcus
Aurelius, the Astronomicon of Manilius, Ver s philosophy. Aristotle was, gil, and Aristotle of course, by the thirteenth century, available
in Latin version through the medium of Arabic and Jewish scholarship. The same is true of Plato and Neo-Platonic thought, es
is
apparent
about Manilius. He lived in the reign of Augustus, being younger than Lucretius and a contemporary of Vergil. His poem, in five books of hexameter verse,
is
an astrological treatise abounding in zodiacal allu and mathematical terms like triangles, hexa gons, dodecatemories, and the dodecatemories of
sions
dodecatemories. Nevertheless, in spite of its apparent absurdity, it is a sober and serious work which well Goethe, perhaps the greatest of repays reading. modern pagans, knew Manilius well and inscribed four of his lines in the Visitors Book on the heights of the Brocken, Sept. 4, 1784:
Impendendus homo
est, deus esse ut possit in ipso; Quis dubitet post haec hominem conjungere coelo? Quin coelum posset nisi coeli munere nosse? Et reperire deum, nisi qui pars deorum est?
must be weighed
as if there were a god in him. will hesitate to link man with heaven? can know heaven save by the boon of heaven?
can find out God save one who has a portion with the gods? See Kramer, Ort und Zeit der Abfassung der Astronomic des Manilius, p. 24; Ellis, Nodes
Manilianae,
p. viii.
26
use of Marcus Aurelius Meditations by this unknown author is a difficult and fascinating
one.
certain that the
were unknown to any writer in the Latin West in the Middle Ages, and the same conviction
Two of the five books of Manillas have recently been edited with great erudition by Mr. A. E. Housman, who is both a Latin scholar and a poet, and an Eng lish translation of the second book published by Mr.
W. Garrod, of Merton College, Oxford. The former says of Manilius: "The last of the poets to feel the impulsion of the furor arduus of philosophic speculation, he addresses himself with arresting insistency to men in whom the age-long fact of social and moral confusion had well nigh killed faith in an order of the universe .... [he hadl an unconquerable conviction of the paramountcy of reason . . . [and] a singular freedom from superstition. ... In his detachment from su perstition and in the lofty expression which he gives to this freedom, Manilius is the peer of Lucretius." And Mr. Garrod: "No one of the poets of stoicism has heard more clearly the call of the universe to its children or felt more powerfully the homesickness of humanity aspiring to a reunion with that which is
H.
divine."
Introd., xii.
The most famous Jewish Neo-Platonist in the Middle Ages was Solomon Ibn-Gabirol, born at Malaga in Spain, 1021, died 1070.
"His
poetry
is
characterized by
its finish
of
form
His poems are mostly seri ous, sometimes gloomy. The most important of these is his Royal Crown ( Kether Malkuth ), a religiophilosophical meditation, which has been translated into almost every European language. Many of his numerous religious poems have been incorporated in the Jewish liturgy. Of his philosophical works, written in Arabic, the principal one is the "Fountain of Life," based on the Neoplatonic system. Its Latin
loftiness of thought.
and
27
is attached to the history of Manilius Astronomicon. Our knowledge of both of them goes no further back than the fifteenth cen tury. But this view must now be revised, for at least one bright spirit knew and loved their works in the thirteenth century. So far as we have positive knowledge, the philosophy of Marcus Aurelius was not known to the Latin
West
in the
translation,
the Great,
others. for the
also wrote an ethical work, "Introduction Attaining of Good Habits of the Soul" OTikun Midoth ha-Nefesh ), and a collection of proverbs ("Selection of Pearls," Mibhar ha-Peninim (From Century Dictionary of Names.) There is an excellent article upon him in the last
)."
He
edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. 1 The complete work was possibly left behind at Rome in safe keeping. After the death of Marcus some friendly hand whether of Pompeianus or Victorinus or Severus rescued it from its unworthy sur roundings under Commodus and gave it to the world. Perhaps this inestimable service was performed by a daughter, Cornificia, whose only utterance that has come down to us breathes the spirit of her father s Posterity had indeed cause to bless Thoughts.
"
the
this
to be published Megalophelestaton Biblion. But it does not seem to have attracted much attention at the time, or for centuries after. We can trace it but fitfully through the ages, as known to one here and there, to a ThemHardly did istius, an Arethas, a Suidas, a Tzetzes. it win through to our own days in one MS. now lost and in another that is incomplete, and it narrowly escaped the fate of coming to us merely as disjecta membra in one of those anthologies which we owe to the
mizers."
moths of
history,
C. R. Haines,
"The
28
is mentioned by any western writer; the earliest known manu Greek and script, now lost, was in the original
came
to light
Even
the internal evidence in the writings of the great philosophic and religious authors of the
Middle Age affords no clue that they had any knowledge, direct or indirect, of the Medita tions. Yet the indebtedness of our poet to him He must have is very large and very evident. had a now lost and unmentioned Latin version
of the Meditations in his hand, for it is almost impossible to think that he had a first-hand
ori
ginal before him, although modern research has shown that a knowledge of Greek in the
West
in the Middle Ages was deeper and broader than was once supposed. 1 It is cer
tainly of moment in the intellectual history of Europe that even one mediaeval scholar has
been found who was familiar with the writings of the only philosopher who ever sate upon a throne. We have here a new tribute to the perennial vigor of the Neo-Stoic philosophy.
In every century since
its
philosophy, or what is more usually known as Neo-Stoicism, has had some followers. No
ology of the Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius," Journal of Phil, xxxiii, 1914, pp. 294-95. Cf. Harris Kendall s translation of the Meditations, introd., p. cxv, and pp. 17 note, and 201.
1
See
De Wulf, History
29
of
mediaeval philosophy,
philosophy covers the whole case of the soul. But men rise on the stepping-stones which other seekers after God have laid. 1 Erasmus said of Seneca: you read him like a Christian, he wrote like a heathen. If you read him like a heathen, he wrote like a Christian." Mr. Edwyn Bevan has written
"If
:
"If
like Justin
some of the most cultured Christian converts and Augustine have passed into the church
through the portals of the Stoic philosophy in the past, not a few of our modern thinkers have passed through the open door of the church into the porch of Neo-Stoicism, i.e., the application of the inculca tions of duty to humanity as a living organism. Neo-Stoicism owes not a little of its content, its earn estness, its moral ardour, to the influence of early
. .
Christian
1
nurture."
St.
Ambrose
"
lar morality of Ciceronian Stoicism, which spread among cultured western Christians,
had,
by its combination *with monastic morality, brought about, in Pelagianism, the crisis so decisive for the dogmatics of the west." Harnack, History of
p. 49.
"is
Dogma, V,
the consistent outcome of the [Pelagianism] Christian rationalism that had long been wide spread in the west especially among the more cultured that had been nourished by the popular philosophy in fluenced by Stoicism and Aristotelianism, and had by means of Julian [of Eclanum] received a bias to Stoic naturalism." Harnack, Ibid., V, p. 172. 2 Quarterly Review, June, 1910. Mr. Bevan is in error in this paragraph with regard to Augustine. "Louis Gourdon, Essai sur la conversion de St. Augustine, Paris, 1900, has shown by an analysis of Augustine s writings immediately after his conver sion [A. D. 398] that the account he gives in the Confessions is premature. The crisis in the garden marked a definitive conversion from his former life,
30
The
tianity
influence of Stoicism
is
very interesting.
in
stantinople,
the
reign
emperor
world,
Arcadius
[395-408], weary
of the
monastery of Mount Sinai and transmuted the Thoughts of Epictetus into a manual of devotion and dis
retired to the solitude of the
of the monastery. Hildebert, bishop of Le Mans, in the twelfth century, composed a Stoic treatise entitled Moralis philosophia de honesto et utili, in imi
cipline
for
the
monks
ous disregard of history, he made Cicero and Seneca the interlocutors. In the preface of 2 he says that he was led in a dream this work to endeavor to formulate the philosophic
thought of antiquity, and that in the dream he was told that Cicero was the greatest moral 3 Hildebert followed ist of the pagan world.
but it was to the Neo-Platonic spiritualism, and only a halfway stage towards Christianity. The latter he appears not fully and radically to have embraced William James, until four years more had passed." The varieties of religious experience, p. 171 note.
1
Zanta,
2 3
La renaissance du
stoicisme au
XVI e
siecle,
In Migne, Patrolog. Lat., vol. 171, cols. 1003-51. Moralium dogma philosophorum per multa dispersum volumina contrahere meditabar repente somnus obrepsit, statumque, ut fit, solo animi augurio primum ilium esse Latinae eloquentiae auctorem Tullium mihi innotuit; post quern ille moralitatis eruditior elegantissimus Seneca, cum quibusdam aliis. For further on this interesting treatise see Zanta, loc. cit., p. 127, and Picavet, Histoire comparee des
vii.
31
Cicero
too,
John of Salisbury,
in his Policraticus, treated the problem of providence after the Stoic manner.
Erasmus, Calvin, and Zwingli admired Seneca more than any other ancient writer. Epictetus was the admiration of Montaigne, and a famous hero of protestantism in the six teenth century declared that the world could well get along without any books except the Between the Bible, Seneca, and Epictetus. determin the and of Stoicism inevitability
tination
put it theologically, the predes of Calvinism, there seems to have 1 been a certain sympathy. But Stoicism has appealed to others besides
ism
or, to
Renaissance pagans and Calvinist theologians. Sir Thomas Brown and Spinoza show its in fluence. What Aubrey de Vere has finely
called
"The
soul s
marmoreal
calmness"
appealed
to
Wordsworth,
too.
man
"
is
Walt Whitman
Though thou
trust in thee.
^ee
Mr. Bevan
development of
32
this
idea
in
Can
Not a tangible one, perhaps; nothing communicable But a religious mood of mind to another s heart.
may be engendered
not
ignobly."
purpose of living
s philosophies yet than iridescent parts of that "dome of many-colored glass" which Ten "stains the white radiance of eternity." nyson makes Ulysses say that he is a part of But we are more than that. all he meets. We are part of all who have gone before, and
The
greatest of the
world
are less
"broken lights"
lived
us.
The
"thought
deciduous years" may cover But really great thoughts the individual. It is as Goethe has rarely perish utterly.
less drift of the
written
"Heard
Of all the philosophic writings which have survived from antiquity I think there is no doubt that the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius
hold the palm for popularity in modern times. Epictetus is his only rival. Plato is unto the Platonists; Aristotle unto the Aristotelians; Plotinus unto the Neo-Platonists; Lucretius unto not the pessimists, but clear and
1 rugged thinkers who are not afraid.
In the
pessimism necessarily the sign of decay, of of exhausted and weakened instincts? [Is there not] an intellectual predilection for what is
Is
"
failure,
hard, awful,
evil, problematical?"
Nietzsche, Birth
of Tragedy, p. 2.
33
Roman world
the two chief powers making for righteous ness were Stoicism and Christianity. Fortu
nately for the enduring fame of Marcus Aurelius as a philosopher he lived in an age of transition when Stoicism had freed itself from its earlier almost adamantine hardness, without losing its primitive ruggedness of
character, and had imbibed some of the ethe real softness of Neo-Platonism, and perhaps
of Christianity, too. 1 It is this transitional nature of Aurelius thought which makes him
a connecting link between ancient pagan Stoic philosophy and Christianity, and gives his Meditations such a remarkable popularity among serious-minded men even to-day. The charm which this unique soliloquy, originally written for no eyes save those of the author,
has for
"The
men who
live for
light that never was on sea or land, The consecration and the poet s dream,"
It is
is
said of
his
Leo
XIII. that
mind
and
unit,
man
the
without
quite
attaining
Christian
ideal,
which declares that he can only find his higher self in and through the development of the higher self in others." Alston, Christianity and Stoicism in the second century, p. 9.
34
is one in sentences of the Meditations. stance out of many of the persistent influence
"It
of Stoicism and
its
undiminished fascination
for the nobleminded of any creed, or no creed, in almost every age or country of the civilized
world."
"the
Spedding called Edward Fitzgerald and said that "his quietists," like a was pirated copy of the tranquility
1
prince of
peace of
God." Fitzgerald was not a pro fessed Stoic; neither was this mediaeval poet of ours. But each leans hard upon the Stoic
philosophy, nevertheless, and the tranquility of each has a striking resemblance to that of
the Stoics.
those
Whoever our author was, he was one of men not brave enough outwardly to defy
the church s authority; yet true sufficiently to himself at least to tend the flame of the light
Thereby he gained a which neutralized within spiritual tranquility the narcotic effect of outward compromise and
within his
soul.
own
conformity. While his poem is partly tinc tured with the lofty scorn of Lucretius, and much with the tonic quality of the Stoic phil osophy and the spirit of the Aristotelian man
of inquiring mind, yet it is also imbued with the softer mysticism of Neo-Platonism. But, above all, the poem is pervaded with a ration
alism, a scientific quality of mind, rare almost
to the point of non-existence in the
Ages.
Whoever
the author
Bevan,
35
things with level eyes and in the calm light He may have outwardly con of reason. formed to the precepts of Holy Church, but
spirit.
To him
Nor
The authority of the church had no binding 1 force upon his imagination or meditation. He was a pure individualist. The massweight of mankind had no force for him. To him the religion of the time was a vulgar superstition. For him religion had to be, not
a
mass of credulous
He had
that antiseptic quality of mind which refused to accept a teaching which violated
to
He refused his intelligence and his reason. believe doctrines totally incapable of
proof. He knew that instinct proves nothing, or everything, as one chooses, and that the
argument derived from it is a fallacy. But I must bring this introduction, already too long, to an end. Instead of being a porch through which the reader might enter into the poem, I fear that I have made it a peristyle
In the usual acceptation of the word, perhaps, this poem may hardly be called a While I have often translated translation.
instead.
1 But at the bottom of Learning alters us our souls . there is certainly something unteachable, a granite of spiritual fate, of predetermined decision and answer to predetermined, chosen ques
"
...
tions."
Nietzsche,
Evil, p. 181.
literally, I have not infrequently paraphrased the thought. The Latin language was capable of a density, a terseness of expression, which the English tongue rarely possesses in the
same degree; on the other hand, a mediaeval writer was usually inclined to be turgid. This double characteristic of the original has some times led me to expansion, sometimes to con
traction
There are a few of the thought. stanzas which have no absolute equivalent in
the original ; these are rather summings up of the author s feelings than literal reproduc tions of his language. In no case can they be
considered as foreign to his mind. For they are in entire harmony with other liberal
thought of the time. Sir Rennel Rodd, in his recently published delightful translations from the Greek anthology, 1 has written: "Of
the quality of verse translation there are many tests: the closeness with which the intention
and atmosphere of the original has been main tained; the absence of extraneous additions; the omission of no essential feature; and the interpretation, by such equivalent as most ade
quately corresponds, of individualities of style and assonances of language. But not the least essential justification of poetical trans
lation
is
poem on
I
own
account."
plead guilty to my critics, of sins both of omission and of commission, if this be the
*Love, Worship, and Death, London, 1916.
37
canon law of the translator for no one knows better than I how far I have fallen short of But one hope I the ideals here expressed.
;
cherish, namely, that my poem constitutes in form, in subject, and in spirit that it is a poem in spirit and in truth.
still
poem
The metre of
is
hexameter.
written
effect its
Mr. W. world of the few who were fortunate enough to discover it a translation of parts of Lucre
tius
in English, fails of the usage possesses in the classic tongue. H. Mallock some years ago gave to the
by a master
gerald s Rubaiydt of Omar Khayyam.^ The success of his experiment has emboldened me to court failure by trying to use the same verse
poem. I realize how rash and perhaps impossible a thing it is which I have endeavored to do.
structure for this
Benson, in his Life of Edward Fitzgerald, has said: "There is a certain priestly mood
which
falls
upon those
is
in
whom
is
creating what
very imperious." This study has been a labor of love with me for several years. In order to understand and
to feel the spirit of the
1
beautiful
theme
have
atten-
W. H. Mallock, Lucretius on Life and Death, Lon don, John Lane, 1900. Mr. Paul E. More has pub lished in the Nation of November 30, 1916, six stanzas, in Fitzgerald s verse form, of a translation of the Bhagavadgita.
38
most important lively read the history of the forerunners and rivals of Christianity, and
may
some I say it without pretentiousness? gleams of the piercing spiritual beauty of those ancient pagan cults seem to have illu Two minated the page as I have written. lines, which every reader will recognize, have been borrowed directly from Matthew Arnold I have used them because and Tennyson.
they quite exactly express the sense of the Latin lines, while the beauty of their form the argument of mine imparts a charm to
"
afflicted
stile."
In the copious notes which are appended to the text of the poem, I have endeavored to
trace back every line and every allusion to what I believe to have been the original source
39
PROEM
Where
the stately poplars quiver In the sinuous Seine river,
ridges,
T is
This
of mediaeval time
my rhyme
Dwelt a youth of clerkly ways Delving days, And many a weary night
By
Over monkish Latin lore, Volumes hoar. Dry and musty was the quaint old
Knowledge
saint-told,
He was weary
of the query
Of the schoolmen s mind; And his thought bent in its yearning To the learning Of the world long years behind,
For his brain seethed with the dreaming And the teeming Thoughts which faster, vaster, From the master Minds of eld unto him came.
41
THE POEM
It
In student fellowship
II
voice
came crying
"Shut
to thy books,
To be
For they be
Ill
"All
vision has
become a book
that s sealed
To
ever plough that sterile field. Write thou this vision, for in days to come
spirit s fruit
those
who
Thy
yield."
IV
The wind
Thy
that through the keyhole blew said: teachers have no wisdom to bestow;
"Lo,
Those hooded monks tell all their thoughts like Untouched the door sprang wide and bade me
43
beads."
"Go."
V
The time of any man
is little space Methinks; his spot of sojourn but a place Apart, and history an ocean marge Whence mightiest waves retreat without a trace.
VI
Days, seasons, places, heroes and events Fade and dissolve, and leave no lineaments. The granite piles of Carnac and the Sphinx Tell me, sage, whose are these monuments?
VII
s pyramid The sombre chambers of the dead are hid; Vast galleries and funeral rooms of rock
Whose
silence
human
VIII
Unconscious monuments of vanished might Frown from the gloom there and the night affright; Pride, kingdom, power in every one of those Grim visages of carven diorite.
IX
of those bones proprietaries were? Whose frames those ashes formed? Canst thou aver? Or when the persons of those relics there
Who
X
As soon find Moses tomb on Beth-peor; Tell me, what name, when hid, Achilles bore;
Which of the isles blind Homer s birth-place was; What sang the temptress sirens from the shore.
XI
How
futile is that
awful
pomp
of death
Even for a day to stretch the vanished breath! The mystery of death is doubly veiled
Where Egypt
XII
Long
lasting
find;
Oblivion scatters poppy as though blind. The epitaph of Hadrian s horse survives
Whether the best of men be known or not, Or if there be not greater names forgot Than those emblazoned on the walls of time This is a riddle none can solve, I wot.
XIV
Cyrus and Alexander, Caesar
three
Who
How
held the
homage
Were
fain to part with their own lives at last: mightier than mightiest are we?
45
XV
innumerable
think!
Journeyed aforetime to that selfsame brink Before and since those great ones trod the earth? Think you that you shall float while others sink?
XVI
Sic transit gloria mundi: those long dead And those late passed all sleep in the same bed.
The years of many generations blend Pope, peasant, prince, when buried.
XVII
are far;
But come, they vanish swiftly as a star That rends the veil of darkness in the night
Like flash of some bright angel
s scimitar.
XVIII
prize is oft oblivion; on a spectre-throne; but shadows are Kings Sceptre and crown are baubles of an hour.
Is there, to
human
life,
a corner-stone?
XIX
The beautiful is oft untimely gone; The rose dies with the day that bloomed at dawn. And yet, what difference to thee or me
In the immensity of time out-drawn?
46
XX
Life
is
Do
The endless files of mankind ceaselessly march. Whence? Whither? Why? Ah, who
XXI
is
sure?
Go, pace the sand beside Atlantic s surge, And see the sun sink slowly neath the verge, Out on the luminous horizon far
together merge.
So sinks the soul. But does it rise once more In some new East? Upon some other shore? Like amarant, immortal in the dark, Or kneel eternally by some barred door?
XXIII
Far inland from the sea the rosy shell Harbors the lingering sound of ocean swell; No still small voice within my inmost heart To me of past or future life doth tell.
XXIV
Man s
Eternity
A
Men
s life the whole, not part. long, life short. Thou art mere mote swimming in the deeps of space. die, gods die, the soul dies with the heart.
life is
is
of
man
47
XXV
when we are done? What What boots the day when sunken is the sun? What then remains of man s much vaunted power,
boots
it
all at last
When
all the
is
run?
XXVI
The world s face has grown grey in quest More time has been consumed than Rome,
of truth.
in sooth,
To conquer and
And
still
XXVII
began? None knows. any where? Where goes The soul at death? Is birth a waking dream And death a swoon? Alas, the riddle grows.
life
I
XXVIII
No one Or how
We
are
not.
The world
Moulding our
wheel
XXIX
Or vase, or thick flat plate, or bowl Mankind is fashioned as the seasons roll: Some clean and bright and shining chalices, Some vessels of dishonour without soul.
XXX
Who
is
Where
the pit from which we digged were, That He might mould us from that neutral clay? Did life on ocean s fertile floor first stir?
XXXI
Life s an uncharted sea, whose shore All we, in vain, from East to West explore, Pacing a few stades off in yearly course: Of the great sea of life we know no more.
XXXII
What of that unknown and mysterious tract Of life environing material fact? Where God forever walks across the deep?
Blind, blind are we, each in his
puny
act
XXXIII
Absorbed.
What
will
it
world
With
all its
And
To
impearled?
XXXIV Our years are but an interval, of long Or shorter time, which some men spend in wrong, And some in listlessness, and some for wealth: The wise alone seek truth and art and song.
49
XXXV
ve read somewhere that Gregory the Great Or was it Augustine? deplored the fate (Because, forsooth, the heathen all are damned) That Trajan barred from the celestial gate.
I
XXXVI
Dear God!
Those ancient
faiths once suckled souls
As
Aye, greater.
We
Deep of stream those spirits were: puny creatures cling unto the shoals,
XXXVII
Afraid to launch out to the deeps which call Because the terrors of the church appall,
By
imposed;
all.
Deaf with mortality s loud-clanking chain, They only rouse my fierce wrath and disdain, With saints excess-of-good-works, or with gifts, Who commerce make of souls, heaven to attain.
XXXIX
Alas, that mankind, searching for the right, Scarce in the wide world finds a glimmering light. Shame on those shameless ones who summon Hell
night.
XL
Life
is
Of men, who fight mere shadows and the ghosts Of their imaginations. They are like Scared sailors wrecked upon barbarian coasts.
XLI
an inward sky within the mind Wider than measurement of sense defined,
There
is
Whose
and free
priestly kind.
born of God, but these Who vaunt the power of ghostly mysteries To bind and loose and thrall the mind, are false
is
*******
XLIII
I
write, to think
par Dieu!
would shrink
XLIV
They each and all belong to Holy Church. My touch is foul and would their garments smirch, Did they but know. I wonder: Are they right?
. . .
my
soul
51
is
in the lurch.
XLV
Well, souls of most men narrow houses are; Thin tenements whose mud walls bear the scar
Of
sordid, wretched,
like
flies.
Thereon
XLVI
Man s
Do you
s world a thing apart. the riddle guess? Within his heart Abides his own real life. Abroad, he grants
life is
from man
The world
art.
XLVII
The
tide of time is at the ebb, and slack; Stagnant is thought; the taste of life is brack.
"Would
The prayer of Samson was for light my cry: that Time s ancient tide were surging back."
XLVIII
As soon expect to sow the sea with Or sail the ripened fields in keeled
Find
fish
oats,
on
Round
XLIX
Why
Or
does the church harass a driven leaf? men thorns when corn is in the sheaf? Give stones for bread and water for red wine?
feed
to
The way
God
is
long and
52
life is brief.
L
Proverbs of ashes, pious words of old, Dark sayings of the fathers slimed with mould,
Lives of saints, silly miracles and cant Daily to us for nourishment are doled.
LI
Olympus gods, thou Rome, hast seen retire; Zeus and Adonis like a dream expire; Glory depart from Ida; Dian s fane In ruin fall, and perish Vesta s fire;
LII
The high gods die like butterflies in frost; The glorious lore of Greece for ages lost. What wilt thou say before the bar of God? Christian Rome, dear to mankind thy cost.
LIII
toll
of thee,
And
LIV
Age
cumulated wrong Like a dread storm on thee shall break ere long.
after age s
Thou
Orbis ecclesiarum caput Rome, shalt yet be like some long vanished song.
53
LV
Temples and churches close beside the mart, Rondured by exercise of every art
Groined arches, chancels, painted
the
human
not their god adore until The sky looks down on ruined wall and sill, On empty courts and grey cathedral aisles Ecclesia dum fuerit Nihil.
I
Yet will
LVII
When desolation strikes their thresholds bare, And wild birds lodge in broken chapiter, When wolves howl in the hollow vaults below When Holy Church is dead, I shall go there.
*******
LVIH
LIX
Men s
thoughts alternate, moon-like wax and wane; Life swims in circles; heart-tides, like the main,
now dead; Hypatia and Cyrillus buried; The Golden-Mouthed and Diocletian Victor and vanquished in the selfsame bed.
54
LX
Poor work
it is
The pagan
Forbids us
mysteries to know.
LXI
Are we more
certain of the soul than they? Is bishop better than a flamen? Say Whether the quality of life be raised, Or if the world be happier to-day.
LXII
For
Aurelius austere atmosphere Breathes the idea of deity more clear Than sensuous emotion, mummery, Or gorgeous ritual to church so dear.
me
LXIII
Religion was the worship of the soul With him; entire surrender to control By what man s highest reason can divine: "He saw life steadily and saw it whole."
LXIV
He
on a noble scheme Of perfect consecration and the dream; Philosophy and poetry he loved: The magic and the beauty of the theme
built religion 55
LXV
Are
lost
with us to-day,
plaints,
Prayers, orisons, petitions, to the saints More than to God, and reverence their bones, And counterfeit their countenance with paints.
LXVI
God is spirit, saith Procul profanil The Book, in spirit worshipt and in faith,
. .
.
Not in material guise, but spirit pure: So was He worshipt when the world was
LXVII
rathe.
Plato, the Stagirite and Socrates, these Zeno, Lucretius, Epicurus Darkened not counsel with scholastic wit, And shame us petty moderns to our knees.
LXVIII
cults,
Of
symbol, allegory, tale How pregnant they with beautiful surprise! Ruddy, like sunrise on a fisher s sail.
figure,
LXIX
For myths are intimations deep and vast (Born of the race s immemorial past, Still with the dawn-dreams of creation drenched) That earliest man the thought of God held fast.
56
LXX
Wine from
those altars old give
me
to drain;
Forget religious tyranny, the stain Of bitter creeds and darkened mysteries,
And dream
is
renewed again;
LXXI
When
Muse
gods called unto gods in high abodes; answered muse in odes and palinodes.
And
Religion then was life and art and song, not a thing of creeds and priestly codes.
LXXII
How singular and strange the heart of man! Apt both to lag behind or lead the van; and then, Prometheus-like, Hugging false gods to fan. from heaven fire the Snatching
.
.
LXXIII
gazing at the cloud, God has bowed Enrapt, And come to earth to walk and talk with me, And with a holy flame I seem endowed.
at sunset,
I
Sometimes
seem
to feel that
LXXIV
That orderly procession of the sky, Marching in serried columns there on high Brings me the sense of God pervading all Not in the sacramental mystery.
57
LXXV
can hold glad communion with the stars. In life s fierce turmoil and the world s rude jars How good to know that realm inviolate Which no priest enters and no dogma mars.
I
LXXVI
Within his own soul each one finds his creed, Springing responsive to his spirit s need; Or golden grain or chaff before the wind,
Religion
is
of
man
own
LXXVII
Hopes, aspirations, faintings sore, Triumphs, defeats, wild strivings evermore, Born of the eager hunger after God
In mankind Edenless outside the door.
LXXVIII
That bore Ulysses to the Western Sea. Not like unstable water, they prevail
LXXIX
hearts to
God
own
chariot wheel,
planetary road, and steal The alchemy of starlight and of sun On these alone God sets his crimson seal.
58
LXXX
"There is
Attuned to
Resolve to be no wealth but its sublime and serious key; To wrest from out the dark of here and now
life."
The
LXXXI
Not length of life, but clean, deep life avails. There is no power whenso the impulse fails. Corn grows of God s good bounty, but for bread Thou needs must beat the golden grain with flails.
LXXXII
Eternity
is
The while
Thou
liv st
Yet worth eternity s whole self to thee. Beware! It may be all thy chance of trial.
LXXXIII
True piety is not with measured pace, With outstretched hands and melancholy face To kneel before dead altars built with hands,
And
to the lifted
LXXXIV To contemplate the world with open mind; To do that duty which we nearest find Philosophy and creed this is to men By sterile teachings not yet made purblind.
59
LXXXV
The poet word by word upbuilds his line; By unseen stages climbs the towering pine; With steadfast purpose, painfully and slow, Thou needs must form that character of thine.
LXXXVI
seek, to strive, to find, and not to yield," To clear the sight of those whose eyes are sealed, This righteousness alone exalteth man;
"To
LXXXVII
Dreaming, with hope of recompense therefor,
Or paltry
Virtue,
may
be the door.
there be
how
frail
it is,
when men
Who
traffic
LXXXVIII
Death Death
is is
the ultimate keen edge of things; the highway of the King of Kings.
He weeps who walks along that road with He who that highway walks intrepid, sings.
LXXXIX
dread;
And was
it not to set forth this high claim That saint and martyr, poet, prophet came? Some to be crowned with laurel wreath, and some
To
When
roars the
lie
asleep?
Not the awed shepherd crouched among his sheep. Whether in still small voice or trumpet blast,
When God
hath spoken
who dare
silence
keep?
XCI
High poetry, high art, high truth, high God, Are reached by paths the crowd has never trod, That ignorantly gropes and stumbles on,
To
all
XCII
As
far as
By
And when, at utmost edge of thought Like Hugo of St. Victor, in the glow
XCIII
Of far-off vision and of dim surmise, To inner voices listing of surprise, I still will climb, till o er some summit far The rose of God s own wondrous dawn shall rise.
61
They are conquered, they break, they are stricken, Whose magic made the whole world pale; They are dust that shall rise not nor quicken, Though the world for their death s sake wail.
SWINBURNE, The Last Oracle [A.D. 361].
Schone Welt, wo bist Du? Kehre wieder Holdes Bliithenalter der Natur. Ach, nur in dem Feenland der Lieder Lebt noch deine fabelhafte Spur.
Ausgestorben trauert das Gefilde, Keine Gottheit zeigt sich meinem Blick; Ach, von jenem lebenswarmen Bilde
Blieb der Schatten nur zuriick.
GOETHE.
63
NOTES
STANZA
II.
Pagina claudere, jamque retexere desine multa. Claudere pagina, denique carmina nostra, audite.
We
Cf. Marcus Aurelius I, 16: "Farewell, my books." find the same thought as to the futility of mere
erudition in
Omar Khayyam,
Myself when young did eagerly frequent Doctor and saint, and heard great argument About it and about: but evermore Came out by the same door as in I went.
"Blind
leaders of the
blind"
xv. 14.
STANZA
IIL
Daniel
viii.
26 ; Habakkukii.2.
totius aetas alius status excipere omnia debet, ulla sui similis res. Omnia migrant.
We
Nihil constat, quoniam minui rem quamque videmus, Et quasi longinquo fluere omnia cernimus aevo. For time changes the nature of the whole world, and one condition of things after another must suc ceed all things, nor does anything abide like itself.
see all things change. Nothing lasts. per ceive that everything ebbs, as it were, by reason of
We
years.
This closely reflects the thought of Marcus Aurelius: The time of a man s life is as a point, the substance of it ever flowing to be brief, as a dream or as smoke, so are all that belong to the soul. The time, therefore, that any man doth live is but a little, and the place where he liveth is but a very little corner of the earth; and the greatest fame that can remain of a man after his death, even that is but a little.
Casaubon
translation.
65
STANZA
VI.
Inrevocabilis abstulerit
jam
praeterita a;tas,
Denique ab ignibus ad gelidas iter usque pruinas Finitum est, retroque pari ratione remensum est; Augescunt aliae gentes, aliae minuuntur, Inque brevi spatio mutantur saecla animantum, Et quasi cursores vits lampada primordia posse. Denique non monimenta virum dilapsa videmus
Quaerere proporro sibi sene senescere credas?
Time now gone by has irrevocably passed. From summer fires to chill frost a definite path is traced out, and in like manner is again traveled back. Some
nations wax, others wane, and in a brief space things are changed and, like runners, hand over the lamp of See we not the monuments of men, fallen to life. ruin, ask whether you would believe that they could
STANZA
VII.
the poet thinking of the striking verse in Isaiah xiv. 18?: "All the kings of the nations, all of them,
sleep in glory, every one in his
Was
own
house."
at rest with kings and coun cillors of the earth, who built for themselves pyra
Or Job
iii.
14:
"...
mids."
to
Ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbram Perque domos Ditis vacuas et inania regna. JEneid VI. 268.
illimitable shade Darkling and lone their way they made,
Along the
Through the
vast
kingdom
of the dead,
s
An empty
STANZA
It is
VIII.
void,
translation.
curious to see how a French poet of the seven teenth century, Pierre Le Moyne, in his now forgotten poem on Saint Louis in Egypt [1653], has visualized the heart of the pyramids in much the same way.
66
les pieds de ces monts tallies et suspendus, etend des pays tenebreux et perdus, Des deserts spacieux, des solitudes sombres, Faites pour le sejour des morts et de leurs ombres. La sont les corps des rois et les corps des sultans Diversement ranges selon 1 ordre des temps, Les uns sont enchasses dans decreuses images A qui 1 art a donne leur taille et leurs visages; Et dans ces vieux portraits, qui sont leurs monu ments, Leur orgueil se conserve avec leur ossements.
Sous
II s
STANZAS
IX-XII.
These identical reflections, couched even in much the same language, showing that there is no new thought under the sun, occurred to Sir Thomas Browne, the immortal author of the essay on "UrnBurial."
What song the sirens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among the women, though puzzling questions, are not beyond all con
"
jecture.
What time the persons of these ossuaries entered the famous nations of the dead, and slept with princes and counsellors, might admit a wide solution. But who were the proprietaries of these bones, or what bodies these ashes made up, were a
. .
. The iniquity of question above antiquarianism. oblivion scattereth her poppy, and deals with the memory of man without distinction to merit of per Time hath spared the epitaph of Adrian s petuity
.
. . Who knows horse, confounded that of himself. whether the best of men be known, or whether there be not more remarkable persons forgot than any that be remembered in the known account of time?"
.
Compare Sir Leslie Stephen s noble brief for the forgotten great in his essay on "Forgotten Benefac tors," especially the last paragraph.
be forgotten before long as we too shall the incalculable majority within a gen eration or two. The thought may be painful, but the reasonable conclusion is, I think, not that we should fret over the inevitable; rather that we should purify
"They
will
be forgotten
67
our minds from this as from other illusions, and feel ashamed of the selfish desire that our own names should be preserved when we know that so many who were far better and nobler than ourselves will be inevitably forgotten, and were better and nobler without the stimulus of any such paltry desire. Though the memory may be transitory, the good done by a noble life and character may last far beyond any horizon which can be realized by our imagina
. . .
tions."
STANZA
XIV.
of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius is positive in these lines of the original. But the Roman emperor makes the trio to be composed of
The suggestion
Pompeius, Caesar,
tot
ditus
III.
evertissent
[I
cecidissent, ipsi
3.
quoque tandem
have quoted an old seventeenth century Latin translation as it brings out the identity between the two more strikingly.]
The lines of the poem are worth quoting here, for they are not unimpressive:
.
prole
Phillip!
Non
eris altior, at
Ludere, proelia, Orbis et extima vidit, et ultima, vir fore natus, Gentibus, urbibus et dominantibus est dominatus.
Illeque Cyrus?
Fama
relinquitur.
Caesar obisti.
Thou shalt not be higher than the son of Philip, but fhall be written less of achievement than he. He saw the farthest and uttermost ends of the earth, born to be a man, and ruled over nations and cities and
kings.
And
thou, Cyrus?
Where
Caesar?
art
And
STANZA XV.
of Ecclesiasticus
This stanza seems to be a reflection from the Book xli. 3, 4, by Joshua Ben-Sirach:
68
Be not affrighted at death thy lot; remember them that have been before thee and that came after. This Wherefore dost is the lot of all flesh from the Lord. thou push from thee the ordinance of the Most High? Be it a thousand years, or a hundred, or ten, there is
"
no grievance concerning
life
among
the
dead."
s fine lines:
Yes, as the son of Thetis said, I hear thee saying now: "Greater by far than thee are dead,
Strive not.
Die also
thou!"
STANZA
XVII.
Persius has put this thought with a pithiness which is the despair of the translator, and of course minus the biblical allusion:
Jam
Curn lux altera venit eras hesternum consumpsimus; ecce aliud eras Egerit hos annos, et semper paulum erit ultra. Satires V. 67.
When dawns
another day
And
Thus one to-morrow, one to-morrow more, Have seen long years before them fade away
still
Les annees paraissent longues quand elles sont encore loin de nous; arrivees, elles disparaiseent; elles nous echappent en un instant. Massillon, Fragment du sermon sur la mart, la brievete de la vie, one of the finest monuments of pulpit eloquence in literature.
Compare:
STANZA
XVIII.
Purpura transiit escaque finiit, ultio restat. Rege coro sata vermibus est data, factaque vermis. At claros homines voluerunt se atque potentes, Ut fundamento stabili fortuna maneret
Et palcidam possent opulenti degere vitam,
Certantes iter infestum fecere viae, Et tamen e summo, quasi fulmen, deicit ictos Invidia interdum contemptim in Tartara taetra; Ut satius multo jam sit parere quietum Quam regere imperio res velle et regna tenere. Ergo regibus occisis subversa jacebit Pristina majestas soliorum et sceptra superba,
Et capitis summi praeclarum insigne cruentum, Sub pedibus vulgi magnum lugebit honorem. Quod siquis vera vitam ratione gubernet, Divitiae grandes homini sunt vivere parce JEquo animo. Purple passes and eating comes to an end, but vengeance endures. The flesh that sprang from kings Men have is become worms. is given to worms wished to be famous and powerful in order that their fortunes might rest on a firm foundation, and that they might by their wealth be able to lead a tranquil life; but in vain, since in their struggle to mount up to the highest dignities they rendered their path one full of danger; and even if they reach it, yet envy, like a thunderbolt, sometimes strikes and dashes men down from the highest point with ignominy into noisome Tartarus; so that far better is it to obey in peace and quiet than to wish to rule with supreme power and be the master of kingdoms. For kings shall be slain and the ancient majesty of thrones and proud sceptres shall be overthrown and laid in the dust, and the glorious badge of the sovereign head bloodstained beneath the feet of the rabble, shall mourn for its high prerogative. Were a man to order his life by the rule of true reason, a frugal substance joined to a contented mind is for him great riches.
STANZA
XIX.
With mediaeval fondness for redundancy the poet turns this thought and figure over and over, which I
have omitted to do in the stanza.
Terrea gloria nunc quasi Quid rogo carnea gloria?
Stat rosa pristina
lilia,
70
Vix
Mox
urnula quo prius orbis fertur humatus. flos fuit, in spatio ruit unius horae; rapitur, licet ingenio micet atque decore.
aggere, nee
mora vespere
[Notice that these two lines are "leonine hexa i.e. hexameters containing rhymes or asson ances. For an account of the technique of this form of mediaeval verse see Taylor, The Mediaeval Mind, vol. II, pp. 199-200.]
meters,"
Laus stat imaginis, umbraque nominis, immo nee umbra. Proinde licet quot vis vivendo condere saecla; Mors aeterna tamen nilo minus, ilia manebit, Nee minus ille diu jam non erit, ex hodierno
Mensibus atque annis qui multis occidit ante. Jure igitur pereunt, succumbunt omnia plagis Sic igitur magni quoque circum moenia mundi Expugnata dabunt labem putrisque ruinas. Ergo rerum inter summam minimamque quid escit?
Earthly glory, like lilies now, to-morrow is as the wind. What is the glory of the flesh? I ask. Tis earth. Its roses? Grass. The rose of yore exists in name only ; mere names we wear. He was a flower and now is slime, that powerful, that brave one. Scarcely would he fill a basket or a little urn who before filled the world. In the morning he stands upon the earth; in the evening he is carried out for burial. That which was but now a blooming flower falls in the space of an hour, and is shortly snatched away, though it flash with the beauty of body and soul. The glory of a statue remains and the shadow of a name. Nay, not even a shadow. You may complete as many genera tions as you please during your life: none the less, however, will everlasting death await you; and for no less a long time will he be no more in being who, beginning with to-day, has ended his life, than the man who died many months and many years ago. With reason all things perish. So shall the walls of the great world around be stormed and fall to decay and crumbling ruins. Therefore between the sum of things and the least of things what difference?
71
Ausonius, the best of post-classical Latin poets, in one line a thought which the mediaeval ecclesiastic could not help being turgid about:
sums up
Una
una dies
Idyl xv.
beautiful lines of consolation Malherbe, which he wrote to his friend Du Perrier, who had lost a little daughter, exquisitely uses this figure of the rose born to perish so soon.
in
the
Mais elle etait du monde, ou les plus belles choses Ont le pire destin, Et, rose, elle a vecu ce que vivent les roses L espace d un matin.
STANZAS
XXII-III.
evidence of the influence of Aristotelian philosophy, as it was metamorphosed through the alembic of the mind. The schol medieval especially the Arabic
Middle Ages only knew Aristotle But in the thirteenth century the a logician. Physics and the Metaphysics became well known, principally through Toledo translations from Arabic into Latin of the abridgements of Avicenna and the commentaries of Averroes. Europe by that time had a complete and systematically developed philosophy. But Averroistic Aristotelianism was at odds with the It taught that traditional teachings of the church. God knew universals, but not particulars; whence it was argued that God had no foreknowledge and was not a providence. Accordingly, if there was no provi dence governing the world, everything must happen by hazard or destiny, unless some other supernal in fluence could be adduced. Since the intelligent mind rejects the idea that events happen from mere chance,
astics of the early
as
to
the eastern doctrine of fatalism (or destiny), the Arabs concluded that everything was determined by and therefore by the the movement of the stars intelligence which ordered them. In such a teaching, obviously, there was no room for the church s chas tisement of the damned or for the celestial glory of
72
the saved. The argument was carried further: Since does not know the world except in universals and not particulars, how could He have created it? Mani festly it is idle to think that the world was created from all eternity and to all eternity. And if not the world, how can the creatures of earth claim immor Averroistic Aristotelianism made a profound tality? Many thinkers accepted it with all its impression. There were clerks at Paris implied consequences. who denied the existence of God, the eternality of the universe and the very immortality of the soul. Such were Boethius of Dacia, Siger of Brabant, and Bernard of Nivelles, whose teachings we will find again farther on. Compare what has been said in the introduction.
God
is to
was borrowed:
"In
qua plus
et
temporis consumptum est quam in acquirendo regendo orbis consumpserit Caesarea domus."
STANZA
This
XXVII.
is
an echo of the piercing ustine in his Confessions, bk. I, mihi, Deus, utrum jam alicui successerit infantia mea: an ilia viscere matris meae? Nam et de
hil
inquiry of
aetati
St.
Aug
Die
ch. 6, sec. 9:
meae
mortuae
egi intra
est
quam
ilia est
mihi nonni-
indicatum
est,
et
Fuine alicubi? aut aliquis? Nam quis mihi dicatista non habeo; nee pater, nee mater, potuerunt, nee
aliorum experimentum, nee memoria.
STANZAS XXVII-IX.
The figure is of a potter s wheel as the symbol of fortune, and the uncertain fashioning of human life. There is a wonderful description of a potter at his task in Ecclesiasticus, "whose manner of working is described in terms which make us regret that the Hebrew original of this passage is not among the
73-
Bevan, Jerusalem under the fragments." Marcus Aurelius says: "The high priests, p. 67. wheel of the world has ever the same motion, upward and downward, from generation to generation." Omar Khayyam s use of the metaphor will occur to all.
recovered
Cf.
Romans
xi. 21.
STANZA XXX.
B.C., held that a fish, and that animals only developed legs and other organs after the waters which originally covered the earth had dried up." Masson, Lucretius, epicurean and poet, p. 172 note. The scientific inquiry of the ancient Greeks far
"Anaximander,
oriri.
exceeded what is usually thought. Epicurus antici pated the "nerve-storm" of the modern physiologist. Masson, loc. cit., p. 347. Atmospheric pressure and the conservation of energy were also divined, if not understood. "The Darwinian doctrines of evolution, both the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest, are closely foreshadowed by him [Lucre The vexed questions of our tius, De rerum natura}.
face
day as to man s origin and destiny look us in the Science has now again in his poem. proved that his propositions as to the constitution of matter, in each case, are either certainly true, or else foreshadow the truth. Indeed, its agreement with the
. . .
modern science makes us wonder how the ancient students of nature, who had no means of veri fying the observations of the senses through experi ment, could have succeeded as they did. Like men walking abroad at night without a lantern, they could take with them no test of experimental inquiry by which to verify their hypothesis; but in spite of all, some faculty enabled them to keep the right path. ... It was Gassendi who rescued Epicurus atomic theory from the forgotten science of the old world and revived it as the truest basis for a scientific study of nature. Through Gassendi and his influence both on Newton and on Boyle, as well as on many other minds of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Epicurus theory has taken firm root in modern
results of
74
science, and has developed, by stage after stage, into that atomic theory of modern chemistry and, in our own day in particular, in molecular physics. . . . What would Lucretius have said to the spectrum
analysis by which the chemist can literally pass be flaming ramparts of the world, and bring us tidings from the distant stars?" Masson, loc. cit., Cf. Tyrrell, Latin Poetry, pp. pp. 76, 81, 83 note. 85-88.
yond the
effect of the church upon Greek thought see Hatch, Influence of Greek ideas and usages upon the Christian church [Hibbert Lec tures], 1890, p. 26 f.
scientific
STANZAS
XXXI-II.
in these lines was probably less sug gested by Genesis i. 2: "And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters," than by Vergil s Georgics IV. 221:
The thought
Deum namque
ire
per omnes
Terrasque tractusque maris, coelumque profundum. Through every land God journeys, and across The ocean wastes and through the depths of heaven.
The psychology embodied here, though written six hundred years ago, agrees with the findings of modern normal waking con "Our psychological research.
sciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential gorms of consciousness entirely different, ... No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of conscious
Yet they may determine quite disregarded. attitudes though they cannot furnish formulas, and open a region though they fail to give a map." James, The varieties of religious experience, p. 388.
ness
And Benson
"The
most precise and definite religious systems, after all, can only profess to touch the fringe of the deep and perennial mysteries of life. They seem to brighten only the crescent edge of the shadowy orb, and leave the dark tracts unrevealed. The mystery
75
of pain, of evil, of the future life, of the brevity of these can not be solved. The utmost that existence, of the religion can do is to illuminate a few yards
glimmering
pathway."
STANZAS XXXIIMV.
nil dulcius est bene quam munita tenere Edita doctrina sapientium templa serena; Despicere unde queas alios passimque videre Errare, atque viam palantes quaerere vitae. Quapropter quoniam nil nostro in corpore gazae
Sed
Proficiunt neque nobilitas neque gloria regni, Quod superest animo quoque nil prodesse putandum. But nothing is sweeter than to occupy the well-
defended serene heights of the wise, built high with learning, from which you may be able to look down on others, and see them wandering and straying in all directions in search of the path of life. Wherefore since neither treasures, nor nobility, nor the glory of a kingdom are of any profit to the body, we must also deem that they are of no profit to the soul.
STANZA XXXV.
is
This was a popular legend in the Middle Ages and alluded to by Dante, Purgatorio, canto X.
Cur etiam nunc est mortalibus horror, Qui delubra Dei nova toto suscitat orbi? Terrarum et festis cogit celebrare diebus?
Profanum. Si certain finem esse viderent jZErumnarum homines, aliqua ratione valerent Episcoporum minis obsistere vero.
Nunc
Nee
quoniam pcenas in morte timendum. Sed metus in vita poenarum, mens conscia factis,
j^Eternas
videt interea qui terminus esse malorum Possit nee quae sit poenarum denique finis Atque eadem metuit magis haec ne in morte
gravescant.
vitae.
76
What is the cause of that shuddering awe implanted human heart, which at this very time is raising up new churches to God over the whole world, and impels men to throng them on holy days? How im moral! If men saw that there was a fixed limit to
in the
the things which beset them they would be able in some way to defy the threatenings of the bishops. As it is, there is no way, no means of resisting, since they all fear everlasting pains after death. The con science-stricken mind sees not what end there can be of ills, or what limit at last there may be to punish ments, and fears lest these very evils will be enhanced after death.
STANZA XXXVIII.
Mortalitatis
Obsurduerunt aures completae stridore catena. [A magnificent line borrowed literally from Augus
tine s Confessions, bk. II, ch. 2, sec. 1.] Prsesulis infula, solvere vincula, vincla tenere, Canone respuit, aereque destruit, astruit acre. Gratia vendita, gratia tradita vi feritatis;
quam parit ternaque marca Quae tamen emptio, sacra redemptio fertur earum.
Gratia, gratia,
ing chain.
law,
sold,
have become deaf with mortality s loud-clank The chasubled bishop refuses to loose bonds and holds bonds tight, according to the canon
Men
for gold.
Grace
is
grace is bestowed through force and fraud. Grace, grace, which is got for a paltry sum of money. Yet this purchase is called their holy redemption.
"The Stoics and the Platonists refused to admit that self-completion could be attained through the sacrifice of another, a view, of course, implicit in the church s doctrine of atonement. Plato waxed indig nant over the moral effect of believing that the unjust man can, while retaining all the gains of his injustice, square the gods and circumvent them by some im Masson, op. cit., p. 26. posing sort of ritual."
the
Roman
has said: "They [Stoics and Platonists] would not admit that the undeserved, vol-
77
untary suffering of one could make another better. Plotinus expressly rejects the idea as immoral. It seemed to him inconceivable that it should be the duty of a good man to give up any portion of his spiritual wealth for the relief of the poor, to make himself worse that others might be better."
. . .
Mr. Henry Osborn Taylor, in his history of The Mediaeval Mind, vol. II, p. 296, admirably contrasts the ancient and the mediaeval Christian thought: "While neither Plato s inquiry for truth nor Aris totle s catholic search for knowledge was isolated from its bearing on either the conduct or the event of life, nevertheless with them rational inquiry was a final motive, representing in itself that which was most divinely human, and so the best for man. But with the philosophers of the Middle Ages it never was quite so. For the need of salvation had worked
in
highest
blood for generations. And salvation, man s good, did not consist in humanly-attained knowledge or in virtue won by human strength; but
men
to
be accepted upon
STANZA XXXIX.
Cum Nam
tot aetates hominum, tot tempora et annos, fortuna lucem quaerat, vix invenit usquam. etiam tenebris immersum Tartaron atra In lucem de nocte vocant.
Perque
man s life, all genera although man seeks ever for light, scarce ever does he find it. For there are those who summon Hell itself into daylight out of black night and the gulf of shadows.
Through
all
the periods of
STANZA XL.
esse videmus. Multi similes nautis projectis ab undis. For all life is a struggle in the dark to some, al though we see that these things are food for laughter
vita laboret;
Many
78
STANZA XLV.
Humana
ante oculos foede nunc jam jacet In terris oppressa gravi sub religione.
For human life lies shamefully grovelling before our eyes, bowed to the dust beneath the heavy weight
of superstition.
STANZA XLVI.
The poet, like Lucretius, "feels that he has escaped from superstition as from some gloomy low-vaulted He has cut his way through the phalanx of prison. his priestly jailers, and now is in the open." Masson,
op.
I
cit.,
p. 410.
by Mr.
escape from prison that gives to some moments and to some thoughts a quality of infinity, like light breaking through from some Sudden beauty in the midst greater world beyond. of strife, uncalculating love, or the night-wind in the trees, seem to suggest the possibility of a life free from the conflicts and pettinesses of our every-day world, a life where there is peace which no misfortune can disturb." Hibbert Journal, Oct., 1912, p. 48.
Bertrand Russell:
is
Away from
Where they grudge you the light of day; Where men low-bowing in craven fear To their mis-shapen idols pray. Of superstitious worshipers Enough in the years of old. To-day Have done with portent, myth and ghost
Leave them
all to your teachers gray. [Gesetz der Triibe, in Gott and Wdt.~\
STANZA
XLVII.
totius aetas
alioque alius status excipere omnia debet, Nel manet ulla sui similis res. Omnia migrant. Aurea tempora primaque robora, redde, rogamus.
Ex
79
For time changes the face of the whole world, and one condition of things after another necessarily fol lows in all things. All things move and suffer change. Give back those golden times, we ask, and that pris
tine strength.
STANZA
XLVIII.
Compare Ruraque
curribus, aequor arantibus arida velis, piscibus, aera navibus, astra camelis,
Candida de nigris, et de candentibus atra, Quadrata rotundis mutata. Perhaps these lines were influenced by Lucretius,
III.
784-86:
alto
in aethere non arbor, non aequore in Nubes esse queunt nee pisces vivere in arvis Nee cruor in lignis neque saxis inesse.
Denique
nisi menstrua sunt animarum, Solaque funera solaque munera primitiarum: Quid mora? pascitut, est quia dicitur, est sibi pastor. His fodder is nothing but the purification of souls he Enough and the celebration of first fruits. is to himself, a feeds, he is, because so called
pastor.
STANZA
to
LIV.
An allusion
be caput
city
"
to the historic claim of St. John Lateran urbis et orbis ecclesiarum mater et the mother and head of the churches of the [Rome] and of the world.
"omnium
STANZAS
I
LV-LVII.
confess to have dealt very freely in the transla tion with the original, which is a long and turgid invective Haec neque nomine digna, nee ordine ecclesia stat;
:
Haec vitis perit, haec animas gerit irrequietas. Haec bona perdidit; haec genus edidit ore dolosum, Pectore mobile, re variabile, menta probosum.
80
Recta perhorruit, ordine corruit, eminet astu. Sollicitudine, fraude, libidine, crimine fastu. Est sine nomine, nam sine numine, nam sine jure; Perdida cladibus est, quia fraudibus, hae sibi curag. Pontificum status ante fuit ratus integer ante; Ille statum dabat, ordine nunc labataille labante. Gratia corruit, algor in horruit amplior Istro. Pontificum status excidio datus, exstat avarus; Sternite, sternite, gutture sospite, pseudomagistri
!
O mala secula, venditur infula pontificalis; Infula venditur, haud reprehenditur emptio talis. Venditur annulus, hinc lucra Romulus auget et urget ; Est modo mortua Roma superflua; quando resurget? Roma superfluit, afflua corruit arida plena; Roma dat omnibus omnia dantibus, omnia Romae; Transita vocula longaque f abula persequitur te. Roma ruens rota, foeda, satis notat cauteriat te; Gurges es altior, area voracior, alta lacuna. Roma peristi. Fas mihi scribere, fas mihi dicere Roma fuisti. Fas mihi dicere, fas mihi scribere Roma ruisti. Fas mihi dicere, fas mihi scribere
in
is neither worthy of a name nor erect place. It is perishing from vice and displays a restless spirit. It has destroyed its blessings and brought forth a brood crafty of speech, fickle of It heart, uncertain in affairs, vicious of mind. shudders at the right, is careless of order, distin
The church
its
guished by guile, soliciting, deceit, lust, arrogance, and guilt. It is without a name being without God and without justice. It is destroyed by disasters be cause of frauds these are its care. Lo, a race
vicious of speech, impious in character! The place of the pope once was a tower of strength, firm and inviolable. Now it totters as things totter around it. Grace is dead and a cold broods over us wider than the Danube. The high place of the popes is given over to destruction ; they have become misers. Spread, spread destruction abroad, while your necks are yet safe, ye false teachers. evil age, the chasuble of the pontiff is sold, the chasuble is sold and this commerce goes unrebuked. The ring is sold and hence Romulus increases his
81
Overflowing Rome is dead now. When will gains. Rome overflowed and collapsed in she rise again? her affluence, withering in her fulness. Rome gives all things to all who give all things to Rome.
voice that is gone and a distant tale pursue thee. Rome, thou art a wobbling wheel, a foul enough mark brands thee, Thou art a deep whirlpool, a devouring receptacle,
a deep pool.
Tis
T is T is
right for me to write, to say/Thou hast perished. right for me to say, to write, Thou wast. right for me to say, to write, Thou art fallen.
STANZA
of
LVIII.
p. 171.
STANZA
LXII.
. .
.
Ecclesia munificat mortalis muta salute, Quae bene et eximiae quamvis disposita ferantur, Longe sunt tamen a vera ratione repulsa.
Omnia enim
stolidi
Inversis quas sub verbis latitantia cernunt, Veraque constituunt quae belle tangere possunt Auris et lepido quae sunt fucata sonore.
82
After immemorial ritual the Church, with inexpres down her grace upon mortals. All which things, well and beautifully as they are mani
sible blessing, sifts
fested, yet are widely removed from true reason. For fools admire and like all the more things which they perceive to be concealed under involved language, and think things to be true which are glossed over with finely sounding phrases, the sonorous rhythm of
ear. Cf. Lucretius scription of the gorgeous processional of the worship of Magna Mater.
II.
606-28, de
and mysteries
The principle of the aesthetic function in worship, so sharply condemned in these lines, is eloquently set forth by James, The varieties of religious experi
ence, pp. 458-60:
"It
and mysterious verbal additions just as it enriches a church to have an organ and old brasses, marbles and frescoes and stained windows. Epithets lend an atmosphere and overtones to our devotion. They are like a hymn of praise and service of glory, and may sound the more sublime for being incomprehensible. Although some persons aim most at intellectual purity and simplification, for others richness is the supreme imaginative requirement."
. . .
Ruskin, Stones of Venice [St. Mark s, sec. xx], enumerates the rich "assemblage of those sources of influence which address themselves to the commonest instincts of the human mind darkness and mys tery, confused recesses of buildings, artificial light employed in small quantity, but maintained with a constancy which seems to give it a kind of sacredness, preciousness of material easily comprehended by the vulgar eye, close air loaded with a sweet and peculiar odour associated only with religious services, solemn music and tangible idols or images having popular legends attached to them."
: . . .
STANZA LXIII. I have borrowed this last line from Matthew Arnold s famous sonnet, for it quite exactly translates
the Latin:
tueri.
STANZA LXV.
superstitione tollenda religio tollitur, Cicero, De divinatione, II. 72, 148. "True religion is raised by the destruction of superstition." The materialism, the grossness, the bigotry, the igno in a word, the superstition which pervaded rance mediaeval faith found one of its strongest manifesta The Iconoclastic tions in the veneration of relics. Controversy in the eighth century was a revolt against the abuses of the practice. The more intelligent and the deeper spiritual natures of the Middle Age pro tested in vain against the worship of relics. Guibert de Nogent, born 1053, in the diocese of Beauvais, wrote a famous treatise, De pignoribus sanctorum, which he dedicated to Eudes, abbot of St. Symphorian
Nec vero
wrote
de Beauvais. See Le Franc, Le traite des reliques de Guibert de Nogent, in Etudes du moyen-age dediees a Gabriel Monod, pp. 285-306. Possibly this cry of outraged intelligence of more than a century before
to the poet.
Aurea tempora primaque robora praeterierunt Aurea gens fuit, et simul haec ruit, ilia ruerunt. Pristina saecula non nisi regula nota regabat; Saecula pristina non nisi pagina viva docebat. Qua? modo marmore qualibet arbore templa
;
struebant;
its
Golden the race was, and when it fell they The primitive age governed only by rules that fell. were known. The primitive age taught only from the The temples now built of marble they living page. built of any tree; the halls now adorned with sculp ture they adorned with devotion.
STANZA
LXVII.
lines of the original here seem to be an ampli fication of Horace s line in the Ars Poetica [line 3091 :
The
Rem
tibi Socraticae
84
of Cicero s
. . .
"errare
mehervera
quam cum
istis
Tusc. Disp.,
I.
17, 39.
STANZA LXIX.
ite
religious mysticism here reflected was a favor teaching of the votaries of paganism in the fourth century A.D. and implicit in the belief of Julian.
The
the expressions of God and of but they follow the usual method of divine revelation, to wit, mystery, and alle The myths state clearly the one tremendous gory. fact that the Gods are; that is what Julian cared about and the Christians denied: what they are the myths reveal only to those who have understanding." Sir Gilbert Murray, Four stages of Greek religion,
"The
myths are
all
the
goodness of God;
p. 158.
The most famous exponent and populizer of the doctrine was Euemerus, a Greek mythographer who
lived in the second half of the fourth century B.C. a kind of philosophical romance, Euemerus de "In clared that he had sailed to some No-Man s Land, Panchaea, where he found the verity about mythical times engraved on pillars of bronze. This truth he published in the Sacra Historia [ lera Anagraphe], where he rationalised the fables, averring the gods had been men, and that the myths were exaggerated and distorted records of facts." Andrew Lang, Myth, ritual and religion, I. 15.
The dying paganism of the fourth and fifth cen turies believed that "Greek philosophy was the relic of a primeval relation." Mark Pattison, Life of Even Dante leaned some Isaac Casaubon, p. 440. what towards this belief. Roger Bacon in the thir teenth century believed that inspiration was relative, not absolute, and so far qualified the current teach ing of the absolute and sole divine inspiration of the scriptures by holding that the ancient philosophers
had been
"God
partially inspired.
"to
illuminated their minds," he writes, de sire and perceive the truths of philosophy. He even
85
The study
of
wisdom
may always increase in this life because nothing is Therefore we later perfect in human discoveries. men ought to supplement the defects of the ancients, since we have entered into their labors, through which, unless we are asses, we may be incited to im
further for one s II. p. 492.
"
It is a disgrace to keep using prove upon them. merely what has been attained, and never reach self." Taylor, The Mediaeval Mind,
subtle transcendentalism of the Greek fathers to Latin Christianity; the characteristics of Roman life as reflected in Roman worship are plainly visible in the Latin fathers. From Minucius Felix onwards, the Christians who wrote in Latin, so far from being imaginative and dreamy, are one and all matter-of-fact; historical, abounding in illustra tion of life and conduct; ethical rather than specu lative; legal in their cast of thought rather than philosophical; rhetorical in their manner of expres sion rather than fervent or poetical." W. Warde Fowler, Roman religious experience, p. 458.
The
was foreign
For the influence of Roman legal and institutional forms on the disappearance of myth, see Harnack, History of Dogma, bk. V. ch. 2.
In his Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche holds a passion ate brief for the "master-morality" of ancient pagan ism. He believes that Christianity, by reason of its authority, its constraint of the spirit, its dogmatism,
its institutionalization,
has exercised a deterrent and upon the progress of civilization. The world grew older and the dream vanished. For this is the manner in which religions are wont to die out: when, under the stern, intelligent eyes of
inhibiting influence
"
an orthodox dogmatism, the mythical presuppositions of a religion are systematised as a completed sum of historical events, and when one begins apprehensively to defend the credibility of the myth when accord ingly, the feeling of myth dies out and its place is taken by the claims of religion to historical founda tions. ... and for the rest also a man people is worth just as much only as its ability to impress
86
trary happens
The con . experiences the seal of eternity. when a people begins to comprehend itself historically and to demolish the mythical bul warks around it; with which there is usually con nected a marked secularization, a breach with the unconscious metaphysics of its earlier existence, in Birth of Tragedy, pp. all ethical consequences."
on
its
. .
STANZAS
LXXIII-IV.
Nam cum
Luna
Et venit in mentem solis lunaeque viarum, Tune aliis oppressa malis in pectora stupor, Ille quoque expergefactum caput erigere infit Quod forte Dei nobis immensa potestas Sit, vario motu quae Candida sidera verset.
When we
calls our minds upward to the stars. look up at the celestial temples of the world on high, and see the sun and moon and the stars the moon and the light of day, and the night with its and note the regularity of their motion, solemn fires we can hardly avoid the thought that it can only be some infinite and divine power which wheels the bright stars in their varied motion. The sentiment in these lines is a good example of what has been characterized as "the emotion which is roused by sudden revelations of the infinitudes, the
silences
and
eternities that
surround
us."
Aristotle,
Seneca, and Kant use almost the same language in contemplating the heavens. Kant found two things in the world still forever wonderful
Lucretius,
The starry heavens above and the moral law within." Aristotle relates that to the question: What made life
"
worth living? Anaxagoras replied: "Contemplating the heavens and the total order of the Cosmos."
STANZA LXXV.
Haec ego divino cupiam ad sidera flatu Ferre, nee in turba nee turbae carmina condam. Sed in coelo noscenda canam mirantibus astra.
87
I would bear my song with divine measure unto the stars. Not in the crowd nor for the crowd will I build my poem. I shall sing secret things unto the heavens; the stars shall hear me and marvel.
STANZA LXXX.
The phrase
is
have adopted
STANZA LXXXI.
Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean, vol. I, p. 181, has said: "Religion has been always something to be done, rather than something to be thought or be
lieved or
loved."
Both Seneca and Martial express the thought em bodied in these stanzas: Quam bene vivas refert, non quamdiu. Seneca,
Ep., xviii. 2.
Non
over,
Martial,
xi. 32, 8.
"Only
"is
the
present,"
ours.
ours to dispose
All of them, though, are echoing a saying of Epi curus: "We are born once; twice we cannot be born: for eternity we must be non-existent. Yet thou who art not master of to-morrow, puttest off the right time. The life of all of us is ruined by procrastina tion, and it is on this account that each of us dies before he is ready."
reflections of the in
The
Stoics a sufficient
a philosophy which has had its existence" modern votaries. Renan said to his wife when he was dying: "Be calm and resigned. We undergo the laws of nature, of which we are a manifestation. We perish,
end of
we disappear, but heaven and earth remain, and the march of time goes forever forward."
So by
also Sir Leslie
"We
ourselves, if comfort be needed, the reflection that though the memory may be
may comfort
transitory, the
life
and char
acter may last far beyond any horizon which can be realized by our imagination." Forgotten Benefactors [last sentence].
STANZA LXXXIII.
In the original these lines are very sonorous:
Nee
Vortier ad lapidem, atque omnes accedere ad aras, Necprocumbere humiprostratum,et pandere palmas.
Nor does religion consist in showing one s self constantly, with veiled face, before a stone, and ap proaching all the altars, nor in prostrating one s self on the ground and stretching out open hands towards the sanctuaries.
STANZA LXXXIV.
Perque pedes proprios nascentia carmina surgunt. Per partes ducenda fides, et singula rerum Sunt gradibus tradenda suis, ut cum omnia certa Notitia steterint, proprios revocentur ad usus. Sic mihi cunctanti tantae succedere moli
Materies
steps a poem rises and comes to live. line by line, step by step, till all things stand sure in knowledge. Even so I, timidly endeavoring a great labor, must first collect the ma terial of the building, letting wait reason s larger plan. For all things grow gradually.
By measured
I too
must learn
This is thoroughly Aurelian: "Word upon word, every one by itself, must the things that are spoken
89
And so the things be conceived, and understood. which are done, purpose after purpose, every one by
itself
likewise."
Casaubon
s translation
[VII. 4].
STANZA LXXXVI.
Lovers of Tennyson will at once recognize the source of the first line of this stanza. It quite exactly translates the Latin verse of the mediaeval poet:
Expetam
et
omnia comperiam,
nil
cedere certus.
STANZA LXXXVIII.
Mors Mors
via maxima, mors patet ultima linea rerum; acies rerum, quisquis mortem effugit Contempserit ; timidum quemque consequitur.
Cf. Quintus Curtius, IV. 14, 25.
De
STANZA LXXXIX.
Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, bk. II, ch. 9, hits off this
same thought:
"Was it not to preach forth this same Higher that Sages and Martyrs, the Poet and the Priest, in all times, have spoken and suffered; bearing testimony through life and through death, of the God-like that is in man, and how, in the God-like only has he
strength and
freedom."
STANZA XC.
will not fear?
Compare Amos iii. 8: "The lion hath roared, who The Lord God hath spoken, who can
and Hosea xi. 10: "They shall walk prophesy"; after the Lord, who shall roar like a lion." The lion is the symbol of strength and truth in
but
Who
does not
I
remember the
thustra [pt.
will
."
lion in Nietzsche:
I.
1]:
"The
90
STANZA
XCII.
Like Euripides in the great transition epoch of Greek thought, the poet is resolved to grope his way to God along the line of reason. Fato et tempore confectus, fessusque labore, At tantum, pol, quantum animo contendere possum ; Nam neque decipitur ratio, nee decipit umquam. Etenim alid ex alio clarescet nee mini caeca
Nox
Pervideam:
iter eripiet quin ultima naturae ita res accendent lumina rebus.
fate,
yet will I keep on searching and finding all things to the limit of my power. For reason never deceives nor is deceived. For one thing after another will grow clear, and dark night will not rob me of the road or keep me from examining the ultimate things of life. So old things will light the torch for
new
things.
this stanza
Compare
with
II.
884
f.
of the Trojan
Women:
Whoe er
Of
Base of the world, and o er the world enthroned, thou art, Unknown and hard of surmise, Cause Chain of Things or Man s own Reason God I give thee worship, who by noiseless paths
justice leadest all that breathes
and
s
dies.
Murray
So, in the
"Zeus,
translation.
Agamemnon, ^Eschylus says: who made for man the road to thought."
This tribute to the power of reason is so purely Greek in character that it must have been derived by the
poet from Lucretius.
of St. Victor was born at Hartingam in in 1096, and died at the monastery of St. Victor, near Paris, in 1141. He was one of the great est mystics of the Middle Ages. See Haureau, Hugues
Hugo
Saxony
de
1859;
DeWulf, History
of Phil
91
STANZA XCHI.
This figure, comparing climbing a high mountain, tine s Confessions, bk. VII
pilgrimage to be found in Augus [last paragraph] cacumine videre patriam
spiritual
is to
:
Et aliud est de silvestri pacis et iter ad earn noninvenire ... at aliud tenere viam illuc ducentem. For it is one thing from the mountain s shaggy summit to see the land of peace and to find no way thither and another to keep on the way that
.
is
refer
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